Veliswa Boya: lifting other women as she rises

[JehlaniAfrica]

Veliswa Boya has never been one to stand still and says she thrives in challenging situations. How else would this ex-Mainframe developer, turned Business Analyst end up 2x AWS (Amazon Web Services) Certified, working as a Cloud Engineer at the biggest bank by assets in Africa.

Unbeknown to her at the time, when she was handed a brochure of a female computer engineer back in her adolescents, it would change the course of her life to become one of South Africa’s first black female cloud engineers. “I have always been curious by nature and I don’t like being in comfortable places, a career in technology as a female wasn’t always easy, but my resilience paid off,” said Veliswa.

Her journey to being AWS Certified began almost 3 years ago at a previous employer where the adoption of cloud as a strategy and partnering with AWS presented an exciting opportunity that “that just made sense to me”, she said. Veliswa said cloud is central to digital transformation and gave her a sense of security knowing she was keeping pace with global trends. “To master my skills, I immersed myself into the research, from listening to podcasts, researching templates, I built things and got an understanding of the intricacies of the cloud.”

To validate her newfound skills she undertook formal qualifications and obtained her first AWS certificate which was the Associate Level Solutions Architect. This certification was immediately followed by the AWS Developer Associate and she is now studying towards the last of the associates – SysOps Administrator. Today Ms. Boya is part of a team of cloud engineers and digital experts that are guiding Standard Bank in cloud strategy, engineering and building cloud applications. “I want to be an inspiration to other young women in technology. Something I never had was to look up to people that look like me, in the work I do. I would like to change that,” said Ms. Boya.

Ms. Boya currently mentors 10 female engineers at Standard Bank helping them to develop and create a strong succession pipeline of future leaders in technology at Standard Bank. 

Standard Bank is committed to skills development, development of Women in Technology, and employee retention encouraging employees to stay up to date with developments in their various fields of work. Ms. Boya and her mentees training and qualifications were all paid for by Standard Bank as part of their skills development commitment.